AI moves fast. Are your people ready to use it wisely?

By Deborah Coram, CEO, Safetrac, with an excerpt featured in Security Brief.

You can’t supervise every decision your people make, so what they actually learn from compliance training, and how they apply it, matters more than ever.

I keep having versions of the same conversation with senior leaders.

Privacy, cyber and AI are right at the top of their risk list. They worry about what staff are uploading, what they rely on, and what decisions they make based on what comes back.

They also acknowledge something quite practical. They cannot be in every meeting, check every document or supervise every decision.

At some point, they have to trust their people. My question is: what have you done to make sure your people are ready for that responsibility? If the answer is an annual course that everyone clicks through as quickly as possible, I think you have a problem.

For too long, compliance training has been bought and measured around completion. Assign the course, chase everyone up, get the report and show the board that it is done. But “everyone has completed their training” and “everyone understands what they need to do” are two very different statements.

The difference matters when someone is about to put a confidential client document into an AI tool for a quick summary. Or when they accept a convincing answer without checking the source. Or when they send a report to a client they haven’t properly reviewed.  These are ordinary workplace decisions. People can create serious problems while genuinely believing they are doing a good job.

That is why I believe AI has made the case for quality compliance training stronger than ever.  Employees need to understand privacy, confidentiality, cybersecurity, fraud and integrity well enough to recognise them in unfamiliar situations. They need those principles in their heads while they work, not sitting in a course they vaguely remember completing six months ago.

Take integrity. I have no issue with someone using an approved AI tool to help prepare a piece of work. But I expect them to be honest about how they used it and accountable for what they put their name to.

“AI helped me prepare this. I checked it, challenged the analysis and added my own assessment” is a perfectly reasonable approach.

Passing on an unchecked response as though you have personally researched and verified it is a different matter. You are asking someone to trust work you have not done enough to trust yourself.  Your staff need to understand that distinction. And your culture needs to reinforce it.

Of course, businesses still need technical controls, clear policies and oversight. But there will always be moments when a person has to make a judgement call. Good compliance training helps them make it.

So what does good training actually look like?  For a start, it reflects the person doing it. People working in an office, in the field, or serving customers in a retail store face different situations. They may need to understand the same obligation, but it can apply to their work quite differently.

Managers also have responsibilities that non-managers do not. Recognising inappropriate behaviour is one thing. Knowing what to do when someone reports it to you is another.

Quality training lets you give people courses and scenarios that reflect their roles, responsibilities, and the decisions they actually face. You should not have to ask employees to mentally translate a generic course into something useful.

It should also respect what they already know.

I don’t see the value in making a knowledgeable employee sit through material they can already demonstrate they understand, while giving them too little time to focus on what they are getting wrong.  Especially in today’s highly regulated environment when staff may need to complete 20+ courses per year.

That is where adaptive pre-assessment makes a real difference. Employees demonstrate their knowledge upfront. Where they meet the required standard, they can move past familiar topics and focus on the gaps.  They spend their learning time learning something they don’t already know.

That is a much better outcome for the employee and the business. It is also a better conversation to have about efficiency than simply asking how cheaply you can deliver a course.

Then there is what the training tells you. If a team repeatedly gets questions about confidential information wrong, I would want to know. If managers don’t know how to respond to a complaint, I would want to know that too.  Those answers give you a chance to act before a misunderstanding becomes a real incident.

A good compliance platform helps you identify patterns in training responses across roles, teams and locations. It gives you visibility into knowledge gaps and potential conduct risks, so you can investigate further and direct training where it is needed.  A wrong answer does not prove someone is behaving improperly. But it can tell you that an assumption you were making about their understanding needs checking.

A completion report alone cannot do that.  If your compliance training platform cannot help you identify potential conduct risk, you are missing out on one of the most valuable risk management tools in your arsenal, and in this environment, one you cannot afford to be without.

This is why I find the buying decision so important. If privacy, cyber, and AI are among your biggest business risks, the budget to help people manage them should reflect that.

It is hard to argue that these risks could seriously damage your business; then why treat compliance training as something to buy at the lowest possible price?  Wouldn’t you rather invest in something effective, not just a box-checking exercise?

Cheap training that fails to build understanding is a false economy. You may save on the course and still leave your business exposed to the very problem the training was meant to prevent.

Quality does not mean making everyone do more training. It means choosing training that is relevant, engages people, tests understanding, and helps you do something useful with the results.

At Safetrac, we have spent 27 years helping organisations train their people and build that foundation. We are trusted by leading brands and small and medium enterprises across Australia and New Zealand. Our clients stay because they value training they can rely on and a team that helps them make it work.

That support matters. Keeping content current, getting the right training to the right people, managing enrolments and completions, and understanding the results all take work. Clients need a partner who understands compliance and helps them stay on top of it.

Good compliance training is part of your cultural framework. It sets expectations for what is acceptable, what to question, and what to do when something doesn’t feel right. As AI becomes part of everyday work, that foundation is one of your most important protections.

You cannot personally check every decision your people make. But you can invest in the knowledge and judgement they bring to those decisions.

There has never been a stronger case for choosing Safetrac.

If you are counting on your people to protect your business, give them training you can count on.

This was written with a little help from AI. The opinions, style, review and final say are all mine.